Tag Archives: United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

The 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya was an “Al Qaeda-led event” according to multiple on-the-record interviews with the head of the House Intelligence Committee who receives regular classified briefings and has access to the raw intelligence to make independent assessments.

“I will tell you this, by witness testimony and a year and a half of interviewing everyone that was in the ground by the way, either by an FBI investigator or the committee: It was very clear to the individuals on the ground that this was an Al Qaeda-led event. And they had pretty fairly descriptive events early on that lead those folks on the ground, doing the fighting, to the conclusion that this was a pre-planned, organized terrorist event,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., told Fox News in a November interview.

“Not a video, that whole part was debunked time and time again,” Rogers added of the attack which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, Foreign Service officer Sean Smith and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, “which just leads to questions of why the administration hung with that narrative for so long when all the folks who participated on the ground saw something different.”

The comments challenged the findings of a New York Times “investigation” which pointed instead to local militias and claimed an anti-Islam video played a role in inciting the attackers.

Asked in November what might explain the initial narrative that an anti-Islam film triggered the attack, Rogers did not answer directly but said all evidence points to the State Department, whose leadership skirted the security requirements for the Benghazi mission. “We think we can fairly sense what was going on here and I will tell you, the answers, I think, are going to lie within the State Department and the decision-making in the State Department,” he said. “Lots of questions to be answered there.”

In the same interview, Rogers also suggested there were attempts to connect between the assailants and the Al Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan. “I can tell you we know the participants of the event were clearly Al Qaeda affiliates, had strong interest and desire to communicate with Al Qaeda core and others, in the process — we believe before and after the event.”

While there was no immediate response from the White House, State Department, National Security Council or Rogers to a New York Times investigation that “turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault,” the Republican congressman who leads the House Intelligence Committee has consistently maintained, in on-the-record interviews, that the attack was premeditated terrorism and not linked to the anti-Islam film initially blamed by the Obama White House.

Plans by the administration to use U.S. criminal courts to prosecute those responsible for last year’s terror attack in Benghazi have thrown up yet another roadblock to investigating the case, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee told Fox News Friday.

“This whole plan has been, all along, to bring them to a criminal court in the United States. I’m not sure that’s in our national security best interest,” Congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan said in an exclusive interview. “I don’t know how anyone could come to the conclusion that it hasn’t slowed it down.”

“Certainly I’m frustrated, I think the committee’s frustrated, and by the way, I think the people who do this for a living are really frustrated,” Rogers said.

Based on intelligence reporting, the delay has allowed the Benghazi suspects to remain free and engaged within their terrorist organizations.

As for possibly targeting them with drone strikes, counter terrorism analysts say the administration’s prosecutionstrategy has effectively pushed that option aside.

“U.S. intelligence officials, and our war fighters in the Defense Department, are hamstrung by a law enforcement model,” said Thomas Joscelyn of the Center for Defense of Demcracies.

“There are a lot of guys who are known terrorists, who are known suspects in the Benghazi attack, who could be taken off the battlefield today.”

The military detention center at Guantanamo Bay is also off the table for holding and questioning the Benghazi suspects

“Our position on GTMO is certainly clear, that we are not sending anyone to GTMO, that in fact, we are working to reduce the population at GTMO, ultimately with the goal of closing it.” Marie Harf. State Department spokeswoman, said Friday.

Another problem is that while a criminal case requires physical evidence, by the time the FBI reached the consulate where four Americans died on Sep. 11, 2012, the crime scene was contaminated.

Seven hundred retired Military Special Operations professionals from the organization “Special Operations Speaks” sent a letter to the House of Representatives urging members to support H.Res 36, which will create a House Select Committee to investigate last September’s deadly terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

“It appears that many of the facts and details surrounding the terrorist attack which resulted in four American deaths and an undetermined number of American casualties have not yet been ascertained by previous hearings and inquiries,” the letter states. It continues further, “Additional information is now slowly surfacing in the media, which makes a comprehensive bipartisan inquiry an imperative. Many questions have not been answered thus far.” The letter puts forth over twenty unanswered questions the select committee should address.

Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA), a sub-committee chairman on the House Appropriations Committee, issued a resolution for a House Select Committee to investigate issues surrounding the Benghazi Attack last November in the 112th Congress. He re-issued his resolution for the select committee when the 113th Congress began. The resolution currently has over 60 co–sponsors.

Only Speaker John Boehner (R–OH) can appoint a Select Committee and Boehner appears to mainly rely on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate the Benghazi attack. However, any information that may be garnered from that committee will, as always, remain classified.

It is very important to get movement on this before the 2014 elections. The answers to remaining questions on what happened in Benghazi could potentially affect the balance of power in the House and maybe even the Senate. Please contact your representatives!

Over the last four years, the United States has suffered a series of comprehensive intelligence failures. These intelligence failures ranged from a lack of preparation for the attacks of September 11, 2012, the misguided assessment that there was a moderate group of Taliban willing to form a government and the refusal to believe that the Arab Spring would lead to Islamist takeovers, rather than liberal open societies.

The Obama Administration’s foreign policy has been one disaster after another and it has been quick to blame intelligence failures for its own mistakes. When accounting for its lies about a YouTube trailer leading to the attack on the Benghazi mission, Obama blamed the intelligence. But it turned out that the intelligence had been edited and censored for political reasons. What appeared to be an intelligence failure in Benghazi was actually political manipulation. And the same may well be true of the entire Arab Spring, of Afghanistan and the entire spectrum of attacks on September 11, 2012.

As a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was proven correct in all the areas where the Obama Administration and its political allies suffered from intelligence failures.

In September 2011, one year before the attacks, Michele Bachmann warned that the Arab Spring was a disaster that would lead to the rise of radical elements across the Middle East. Widely ridiculed for it at the time, she was demonstrating the insight and foresight that a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is supposed to have.

Where Obama was proven wrong; Bachmann was proven right. When Michele Bachmann first warned about the Muslim Brotherhood, it was an obscure organization to most people in Washington D.C. After its successful seizure of power in Egypt however, Bachmann’s critics no longer have any excuse for pretending that condemning the group’s ruthless manipulations is a conspiracy theory. Not when Egyptian liberals are among the loudest voices warning about the Muslim Brotherhood threat; not just to Egypt or the Middle East, but to America as well.

A recent article in the Egyptian magazine, Rose El-Youssef listed some of the prominent and influential Muslim Brotherhood figures with access to the policymaking apparatus of the Obama Administration. Two of those figures were in the Department of Homeland Security. This article was another piece of evidence in a mountain of evidence, much of it collected by the FBI, about the conspiratorial activities of the Brotherhood and its front groups in the United States.

It wasn’t the intelligence that failed. It was the political operation that allowed Muslim Brotherhood operatives close access to the policymaking apparatus of the United States government that led to the politicized intelligence and the policy failures. Those policy failures led to the ascendance of Al Qaeda in North Africa and the Middle East, the triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the attacks of September 11, 2012.

Nevertheless liberal organizations have launched a petition demanding that she be removed from the intelligence committee for spreading “conspiracy theories” and attacking “dedicated public servants”. After the complete implosion of Obama’s foreign policy, such attacks should be seen for what they are; an attempt to silence one of their critics who had been right all along while covering up their own lies.

To understand the source of the politicized environment that led to the foreign policy disasters, we need look no further than the Center for American Progress and its tentacle, Think Progress.

The Center for American Progress is a secretive think tank funded by covert donors which was described by Time Magazine as Obama’s idea factory and the single greatest influence on his administration. For all intents and purposes, CAP was the criminal brain in the Frankenstein of old Clinton staffers that would become the Obama Administration.

Congressman Mike Rogers (R-MI) Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee gives an exclusive interview to The United West team at the Lynn University Presidential Debate 2012.
Congressman Rogers gives you an in depth analysis on several topics having national security importance. Some of the topics you will learn about in this interview are:

– The Muslim Brotherhoods dangerous level of engagement with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
– (DHS) whitewashing of FBI documents erasing all references to our Islamist adversaries.
– Foreign and Domestic threats of concern to our national security agencies.
– CAIR and other Islamist groups questionable past having a close relationship with our Federal law enforcement agencies.
– The Benghazi cover up needs to be fully investigated and investigated quickly.
And much more.
One of the major points you will learn from the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, is that until we the American people can openly identify who our enemies are and the ideologies they’re working to further hear in the United States, we will never be able to defeat them.
That is why The United West is Striving To Educate America.
Furthering the goals Rep. Rogers articulated is precisely one of the main objectives we at The United West strive to achieve.
Visit our website at http://www.TheUnitedWest.org and learn about the work we do. The United West gives seminars to politicians, law enforcement, and local groups in your community utilizing a group of experts who have made national security issues their lives work.
Our Constitution, Bill of Rights,free market system, and man made laws are fragile and require our vigilance if this country is to reach it’s 300 year anniversary promoting freedom and liberty to all who wish to earn it.
God Bless America and God Bless Our Troops
The United West Uniting Western Civilization For Freedom and Liberty

Two weeks ago, I wondered whether CIA Director Petraeus was politicizing the intelligence after a source told Fox News on September 27 that three days after the Benghazi assault, Petraeus briefed the House Intelligence Committee that “Benghazi was an out-of-control demonstration prompted by the YouTube video. According to the source, this was `shocking’ to some members who were present and saw the same intelligence pointing toward a terrorist attack.”

Knowing Petraeus’ sensitivities to the faux-stimulus of what he has called in Senate testimony “Arab anger,” such politicization, or, perhaps better, such Arabizing of the intelligence would likely come naturally to him. No stranger to politicking, Petraeus as CENTCOM commander engaged in what was described as an “unprecedented” political push in early 2010 on behalf of Islam’s Israel-centered demonology in order to enhance Americas’s military standing in Iraq and Afghanistan. This dovetailed neatly with his perhaps surprising take on Gitmo — close it, its “existence has been used by the enemy against us” — and his really shocking take on Hezbollah: “Hezbollah’s justifications for existence will become void,” Petraeus told the Al Hayat as reported in the Lebanese Daily Star, “if the Palestinian cause is resolved.” Given this Arabist sensibility (and don’t forget one of his thesis directors at Princeton was Stephen Walt of Walt & Mearsheimer), it’s no stretch to imagine the man taking up cry of Islamic video-rage as well.

Now, with so many of the adminstration’s bald lies about Benghazi being exposed, PJ Tatler’s Bryan Preston is asking not whether Petraeus was politicizing the intell, but whether he is “among the sources of the Benghazi deception.”

In a post called “You Know Who Still Hasn’t Called Benghazi a Terrorist Attack?” Preston reprises some of Petraeus’ appeasement of Koran Rage back in Afghanistan. Preston also notes that several senators sent a letter on October 9 to Petraeus, DNI Clapper and White House CT advisor John Brennan asking for a specific timeline on the Benghazi intelligence They haven’t received an answer.

In what may be a watershed moment in the fight against radical Islam, five members of Congress have written letters to the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Defense, Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence asking for investigations of the Muslim Brotherhood influence in their agencies.

The five members of Congress are Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Tom Rooney (R-FL), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX). Collectively, they sit on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Armed Services Committee and Judiciary Committee. Read about the Muslim Brotherhood’s infiltration into the U.S. government.

These members of Congress need YOUR help in getting their requests for investigations to be taken seriously!

Below is a sample email you can send to your representative in Congress. You can easily find out who that is and get to his or her website by entering in your zip code at this link. Use their contact form to send your message.

Below is a sample letter you can send to them (copy & paste and then add your details):

Dear Representative [Name of Congressman]

I am contacting you to urge you to endorse the call made on June 13, 2012, by your colleagues — Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL), Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) — to launch an investigation into the influence of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups and individuals in the U.S. government.

These congressmen wrote letters requesting investigations by the Inspectors General of the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Defense, Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Each letter referenced concerning incidents related to the Muslim Brotherhood in the department or agency it was addressed to.

As I’m sure you’re aware, the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical Islamic group which supports terrorism worldwide and is using stealth jihad to install Sharia and undermine the freedoms we cherish here in the U.S.

As a voter in your district, I urge you to endorse their letters and show your concern about this important issue.